ToOoOlTiPs: An R Package for Customizable Tooltips in Interactive Graphics

Introduction

Interactive graphics is a type of visualization that allows users to interactively inspect a plot. One of the most basic interactivity is through tooltips, where users can request additional information about a plot element by mouse hovering …

This paper will first review some R packages on interactive graphics and their tooltip implementations. Next, a new package will be proposed for customizing tooltips. Some gallery plots will then be given to showcase how these tooltips help users to better read the graphics.

Literacture review

Some packages on interactive graphics include (Sievert 2020) that interfaces with Javascript for web-based interactive graphics, (Cheng and Sievert 2021) that specializes cross-linking elements across individual graphics, and most recently, (Wang and Cook 2021) for working with time series data in a tsibble structure …

Customizing tooltip design with

is a packages for customizing tooltips in interactive graphics, it features …

A gallery of tooltips

We first show a baseline plot, in Figure , made by the package with data (Horst, Hill, and Gorman 2020).

p <- penguins %>% 
  ggplot(aes(x = bill_depth_mm, y = bill_length_mm, 
             color = species)) + 
  geom_point()
ggplotly(p)

Figure 1: A basic interactive plot made with the plotly package on palmer penguin data. Three species of penguins are plotted with bill depth on the x-axis and bill length on the y-axis. When hovering on a point, a tooltip will show the exact value of the bill depth and length for that point, along with the species name.

Now we will re-create the same plot using the package for different tooltips designs …

Summary

We have displayed various tooltips that are available in the package . These tooltips …